Like all Americans, we were horrified to learn about the bombing of the Boston Marathon.  Like all Americans, we were relieved when the suspects were captured.  Only recently, did we discover that AMREL technology may have played a small role in the manhunt.

On Friday, April 19th, a Honda Civic was found to be parked in Watertown, Massachusetts.  The car had been abandoned by Dzohkhar Tsarnaev after he and his brother had a gunfight with the police.

The police were understandably nervous approaching the car.  According to the most recent reports, the suspects had more than one homemade bomb and had even thrown them at the police during the chase.   Was the car rigged to explode?

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I once read a quote from a futurist that many distinctions that we currently take for granted will be not be valid in the future. Things that seem as different as day and night will be indistinguishable. Day and night, for example. The proliferation of night vision and other sensor technologies will cause future generations to have radically different views about the level of privacy traditionally offered by the cloak of night. Another distinction that is already blurred is the one between manned and unmanned vehicles.  Read full article here.

Recently, the 2013 Robotics Roadmap was presented to the Congressional Robotics Caucus.  This is an updated version of the 2009 report, which helped established the National Robotics Initiative (NRI), a federal multi- agency joint effort.

Members of the unmanned system community are barraged with roadmaps all the time, so it would be tempting to ignore this one. However, key influencers are involved in this roadmap, so it should be considered seriously. You can slog through all 129 pages of the report or examine the highlights described here.

Army Maj. Gen. Lynn A. Collyar, former director of Defense Logistics Agency’s logistics operations, is not scared of sequestration and he doesn’t want you to be either.

“Our budget still has almost $500 billion,” he recently told an audience of anxious Defense vendors. “We can’t afford to just throw money around…,” but “there is still a lot of money out there.”

One person who doesn’t need convincing is Rob Culver, Director of Program Management for AMREL.  After serving in 23 years in the Army with half his career spent in Special Operations (18A), Rob also spent 8 years managing Defense acquisition programs, covering the complete product life-cycle.  Having experienced procurement as an acquisition officer, a Defense vendor, and as a grunt in the field, he has a uniquely well-informed point-of-view about the Defense budget.

“General Collyar is absolutely right,” he said. “Vendors are scared, because they don’t understand the acquisition process.  The ones who learn how to work the system will be the ones who survive and prosper.”

Read the rest of this here

Yikes! The NDIA just announced that it canceled the Ground Robotics Capabilities Conference (GRCC) 2013.

In an email dated March 5, NDIA stated:

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As noted in Wired, the Defense Department has taken a major step toward its goal of “a smartphone for every soldier.” They recently released their Commercial Mobile Device (CMD) Implementation Plan, which details dates, stages, and buys over the next several years.  The DoD may be purchasing as many as 600,000 smartphone devices. As expected, the Pentagon is deliberately being “device agnostic.”  They are looking at Apple and Google –based communication devices, and they have promised to support Blackberry smartphones as well. See below for links to the CMD Implementation plan as well as their overall strategy, which was released last June.

Exerpt from; DoD Commercial Mobile Device Implementation Plan

“As a result of a JROC Capability Gap Assessment, OSD guidance, and strong end user demand for secure classified and unclassified mobile solutions, DoD is orchestrating an effort to provide wireless network services infrastructure, approved devices, applications management, and policies to protect and secure the mobile DoD information ecosystem. The Implementation Plan updates the DoD Mobile Device Strategy, Reference (a), to establish wireless voice, video, and data capabilities in accordance with DoD Instruction 8100.04, Reference (c), by October 2013. The CMD Implementation Plan establishes the framework to equip users and managers with mobile solutions that leverage commercial off-the-shelf products, improve functionality, decrease cost, and enable increased personal productivity….”

• DoD Mobile Device Strategy